We hate hate-speech, but not nearly enough to outlaw it

We do not advocate hate speech; neither do we advocate government involvement (read that, spending our money) on a study about hate speech in social media.

Thirteen House Democrats want to update a 1993 report from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration that focused on hate speech on radio, TV and computer bulletin boards (sounds rather quaint, doesn't it?) See a blog from The Hill here: http://bit.ly/19wHDdT.

The United States Supreme Court has definitions in place for true hate speech. Other speech can be hateful; it can be vulgar; it can disparage a gender, creed, sexual orientation or race. Enraging though it might be to those who are targets and those who believe equality isn't a function of minor genetic differences, it is nevertheless protected speech under the U.S. Constitution.

Hate speech is greatly in the eye of the beholder. We can spend five minutes in most news feeds on Facebook or Twitter and find material that might be considered such. A great amount of today's political commentary seems to consist of coming up with more novel, atrocious names to call opponents, rather than any real debate.

For those on the other side of the political aisle, such might be viewed as hate speech; to those within the same political fold, it's simply talking sense.

Arbitrating what is hateful and what is criminally hateful isn't a job with which we want to see government, outside the judiciary in very specific cases, become involved.

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And it sounds to us like this call to update an old hate-crime study might be a precursor to doing something like that. We will not stand quiet for any even tangential question toward further limitation of First Amendment protections of free speech. There are enough in place.

Court rulings have determined that free speech rights to not extend to cases in which an individual incites panic or directly incites violence. That's the idea of having it illegal to yell "Fire" in a theater -- or to directly advocate and incite for the immediate killing of X because X's very existence is a threat to Y.

The Supreme Court in 1969 said this in Brandenburg v. Ohio: "The constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a state to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force, or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.".

Panic derived from yelling "Fire" in a theater is imminent. Violence derived from proclaiming hate for another group may not be.

Because we have wide freedom to proclaim even hatred of another, irrational though it might be, we also have the freedom and the responsibility to expose it and force it to wither. The Internet is a powerful tool for expressing hate; it is equally powerful at showing the foolishness of such.

We do not need more laws, more limitations, more government oversight. That is authoritarian oppression, and our hatred of that is greater than that for the most hateful of speech.